4 Key Stage 4 students from Norbury Manor Business and Enterprise College in Thornton Heath have taken a Silver Medal at the “European Entrepreneur of the Year Competition 2014” which was held on Wednesday 26th November in Vienna, Austria.
The students, Jada Walters (Year 10), Anastasia Enyioma (Year 10), Hannah Ali (Year 10) and Abishna Vamathevan (Year 11) came together as a result of taking part in an Entrepreneurship Summer School which ran at NMBEC in the previous summer holiday.
This entrepreneurship programme is run by the Network for Teaching Young Entrepreneurs and brings together young people who are interested in developing a business idea over a 5 day period.
Managing Director of NTYE, Usha Kong, said “We have a long standing working relationship with NMBEC and have run the Croydon Summer School at the college for a number of years. Students from other local schools are also invited to attend and take part in the programme and we often have students from Archbishop Lanfranc and St Josephs taking part as well. The programme does a lot for community cohesion as well as developing the young people’s business ideas and this was recognised recently when we were honoured with a British Community Honours Award. We would welcome interest from other schools who may be interested in working with us on similar programes.”
The girls formed a company, AJJA Ltd, and developed a business plan to launch their innovative business idea which is a smartphone app that promotes healthy eating whilst at the same time reducing food waste and saving the consumer money. The app, “CookMyDinner”, allows you to enter the ingredients you have to hand in your fridge and cupboards and generates a healthy recipe to use them up. Built in GPS allows you to find local stores that you might wish to visit to buy more items to enhance your recipe. The students are already planning to further develop their original idea to cover various cuisines so we may see the advent of “CookMyCurry”, CookMyPizza” etc.
In addition to setting up and running a stand at a trade fair as part of the Austrian Government’s contribution to Global Entrepreneurship Week, the NMBEC students delivered a very polished pitch to a judging panel consisting of 14 international entrepreneurs, bankers and business people from across Europe.
They competed against 14 other teams representing 12 different EU countries, with many of the students taking part being undergraduates who have been studying entrepreneurship at degree level for upto 3 years.
To take the silver medal against this level of competition was an outstanding achievement and the college is very proud of the girls, Headteacher, Amanda Compton said “I am always impressed by the range of ideas the students at NMBEC generate as a result of our specialist status as a Business and Enterprise College. We have a long tradition of supporting students to develop their business ideas and we will be watching carefully for this one as the students begin to investigate ways of making their app a reality.”
Following their success at this European event, the team are now fundraising in order to be able to attend the Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship “Dare to Dream Gala” event in New York in March 2015. Here they will be able to meet and network with business people from Wall Street in order to develop their business further and maybe even secure financial backing.
Watch this space !
